


Red

by Demon Dreams (ScribeAzari)



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Ficlet, Gen, Memory Loss, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 23:13:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17692970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScribeAzari/pseuds/Demon%20Dreams
Summary: As she grapples with her fading memory, Alice's pain takes the form of flowers.





	Red

Her domain was hushed again, peace and quiet allowing her the mental space to daydream about the things she’d lost, as she’d done so many times before. It clawed at her, grabbed her by the heart and whispered silkily of things she could never have again. The sky, that sweet, cloud-dusted beyond - she’d adored the blue of it, she was sure, and longed to buoy herself up on wings to dance through it. Maybe she’d once done just that - hadn’t she ridden a cloud at least once?

Her memories had been ransacked, long since tainted and left stale, the beauty marred and torn. Surely black and white should only have lain in the studio’s translation of her world, not in her own memories? She  _ knew _ they’d mentioned colour names before in episodes the studio had set loose in this duller world - so why couldn’t she  _ remember _ them? It didn’t make any sense - she’d been robbed.

Rummaging frustratedly, she slammed a sheaf of paper onto the nearest semi-flat surface. Taking out a pen from somewhere near at hand, she began to draw, trying to capture the likeness of a rose. Roses were iconic, memorable, she hadn’t forgotten roses - in what kind of world could she forget roses? Surely it would be impossible - but there she was, urgently committing one to page lest it flee her mind like so much else before it.

Barring a few mistakes, blotches she was steadfastly deciding to ignore, the lines looked alright - like something an adoring crowd might throw after a performance. Well, close enough. It was beautiful… but it wasn’t complete. It wasn’t perfect. It was meant to be red, that much she knew, but memory failed her yet again as she stared hard at the bloom she’d drawn.

What  _ was _ red? Objectively, she knew what things bore the colour - blood was red, and so was boiling fury, or strawberries, or the sunset - but the sight of it fled her mind’s eye like a startled bird. Concentrating, she gritted her teeth, gripping her pen tight enough to hurt - it shouldn’t be this hard! Red was such a fundamental colour - not like some fiddly little hue halfway between one shade and another - it should have come naturally to picture it.

**_RED!_ **

She scrawled the word roughly, nearly tearing the page in her effort to capture the essence of the colour. Still nothing came to mind. The blood in her mind’s eye dripped black, the strawberries grey and sunset a faded sepia. With a bitter growl of frustration, she whirled to glare at the other pictures she’d littered her living space with.

Blueless bluebells mocked her, elegant but lifeless scrawls. Dandelions and daffodils singularly failed to be sunny or bright, nothing but scratched stills removed from all warmth. She’d had better luck with lilies, so many pale, ghostly lilies… She seized her taunting works, crumpling them all with her failed rose and flinging them into the corner.  
  
She’d pick them all back up later, she knew. She always did. Always tenderly, frantically smoothed out the creases to see again what fragments of forgotten beauty she’d saved, held them close as though they could make any sort of difference against the blurring of time. They were ruined from the start, mourning and far from whole. They were broken pieces, mockeries of the gardens and meadows she  _ knew _ she’d seen before - but they were hers, and they were  _ her. _ She couldn’t escape that.


End file.
